Lakshmi’s move to Colombo had been planned in theory many years ago, soon after both Leo and Ida died, but much had to be concluded before it could be accomplished. First, Lakshmi had to sell her lands in Kurunagala, which she wanted to finish before she moved, not only to have enough money to buy and build, but also because she felt that, once she moved, rapacious politicians would acquire her property in Kurunagala. Second, Old Place and the land around it had to be disposed of, which was complicated by the fact that Lakshmi owned only a quarter of the property. The rest belonged to my grandmother, since the older Goonewardene sisters had both left their own quarter shares to their younger sister. I always thought this was unfair, since it was Leo who had looked after the house and the property for so long, but no one else shared my view. I suppose this was understandable since Lakshmi was not married, and had no heirs except her aunt’s family, but that I thought was a contingency that should not have affected the principles involved.

This factor was further complicated by the fact that Bishop Lakshman had decided that he wanted to retire in Kurunagala, and live in the Annexe that had been built for his wicked Uncle Edward. The Annexe had been used on occasion over the years, last of all I think when I took Nigel Hatch and Qadri Ismail for a couple of days in 1982, shortly after I had been dismissed from S. Thomas’. Lakshmi had been a marvelous host, and sometimes I think I should have pushed her more in this respect, insisting on taking friends there to stay, because it would have enlivened her. But I am not especially gregarious myself, and valued Kurunagala also for peace and quiet, and the opportunity passed.

Twentieth Century Classics by Rajiva Wijesinha is a good introduction to the many authors and the varied genres of literature from the 20th century – dealing with the more famous names such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to more obscure names like Angus Wilson and Somerset Maugham.

As the introduction quotes, ‘a classic is a book that never finished saying what it has to say’ – thus it is important to ensure that they are always available to new audiences so the messages in them get passed on to new generations and aren’t lost in the sands of time. Sadly, many of the current generation misguidedly view them as old fashioned, stuffy and irrelevant in today’s technology controlled world, and thus many of these literary gems have been left to collect proverbial dust. Sometimes the only exposure to these classics people of today get is due to the compulsory reading lists in school. This book aims to change these misconceptions and encourage more people to take up reading these books for pleasure.

Rajiva Wijesinha takes his readers on a tour of the leading 50 authors of the 20th century through his thoughts and musings on the works of individual authors. The sheer depth and breadth of the authors covered clearly shows he is a wellspring of literary knowledge and thus well qualified to introduce authors of a previous century to an audience in the 21st century.

Leo died in August 1971, and Lakshmi stayed on by herself at the Old Place for 17 years more. Of course she could not move immediately, for Ida survived till the January of 1972, and obviously Lakshmi could not have left Kurunagala while her old aunt stayed on, with her Burgher companion and, by then, I think only one old woman to cook and clean. And perhaps, having survived to all intents and purposes by herself, in the rest of the large house, and having begun to manage the estates that remained to her, she decided then that she could survive on her own at the Old Place, at least until she had set up an establishment of her own in Colombo.

Though her aunt, my grandmother, would have been quite happy to have her at Lakmahal, Lakshmi was too fiercely independent to have become part of someone else’s household. Sometimes I wonder indeed whether, doing her own thing at the Old Place for so long, she would not have stayed on even longer, were it not for the rising tide of JVP violence, following the Indo-Lankan Accord of 1987, and the obviously increasing danger to a woman by herself in a large house.

I heard the news of Leo’s death while I was in Denmark, on my way to England in an odyssey that saw me visit seven countries after my Advanced Levels in Madras, before I finally got to London. It was probably the best place and time to hear something so upsetting, for I had seen the most exciting places, lots of antiquities and art in Greece and Italy, and then exotically Prague too by road from Frankfurt, and I was exhausted. Our Danish friends were about the most comforting to stay with, and I could collapse in a home, with just the occasional visit to a museum. The frenetic activity I had engaged in over the previous weeks had tailed off, and I was ready again for domesticity and being looked after.

I went away the day I got the letter to a very minor museum and sat in the garden and grieved. The death was a shock, but not a surprise, for I had long known that the way of life I had enjoyed so much at Kurunagala was staggering to a close. Through the sixties we had seen service more difficult to obtain, the army that had cooked and cleaned for Lakshmi and Leo diminishing over the years. The food too had grown less extravagant, in part because there were fewer people to help prepare it, but also because Lakshmi had decided to take Leo’s diet in hand after he first had heart problems. Long gone then were the luscious chops and rich desserts that had made Old Place a gourmet’s delight in the early years of the decade.

Apart from the joys of staying at the Old Place during the holidays, we also had the pleasure of Leo and Lakshmi coming down practically every fortnight to Colombo to stay with us for a long weekend. They came in his old Humber Hawk, which seemed to us a very grand car, stopping on the way into Colombo at St. Anthony’s Kochchikade, a ritual doubtless instituted by Dottie, who had been a Catholic. That is why Leo and Dottie, and now Lakshmi, are not buried near the rest of the family, but lie in the Catholic section of the cemetery in Kurunagala.

Leo was not especially religious, but Lakshmi was, and was delighted when I decided once to go with her to the Catholic Church at Christmas. My uncle the Bishop was deeply upset that I had not been to his cathedral that day, and was only slightly mollified when I said I had gone to a Catholic Mass at midnight. I suspect he understood that I was getting tired of church-going, and was more interested in spectacle rather than dogma. This has lasted, contrary to his hope that it would be a temporary phase, which he said comfortingly that most young people went through, though I had started it earlier than most.

Kurunagala was a world apart in the sixties, when I stayed at the Old Place, a large rambling house, with different wings for the two households it contained. These were set on either side of the large dim drawing room, which was hung with gloomy black and white reproductions, including of Franz Hals’ ‘Laughing Cavalier’ and two Pre-Raphaelite pictures of scenes from Dante. These now hang in the lower room of my country cottage, where on a tiny scale I have tried to reproduce the compartmentalized household I loved so much at the Old Place.

The ‘Laughing Cavalier’ has vanished, as has another picture my father recalls fondly, of a nymph sitting on top of a globe. The upright piano, on which I played ‘Chopsticks’ and strange mixtures of my own composition, is now with my cousin Ranil since our sisters, who presided over the division of goods after Lakshmi’s death, decided that his wife at least was musical. The other prized relict of Old Place, an elaborately worked glass lamp, was given to me, and it now adorns the upper room of the cottage, and has to be locked away when I am not there in case monkeys invade through the windows. These have neither glass nor curtains, only bars, so that there is little between me and the river and the trees. The pictures were not wanted by anybody, and it is only recently that I have managed to rescue them, along with the oval portrait of John Marcellus.

My favourite in my childhood of my grandmother’s family was Leo, the closest to her in age and the only other of her brothers and sisters to marry. He was two years older than her, and had been at S. Thomas at first, and was then sent to Trinity since it was thought he was not studying. He thus lost his chance to play in the Royal Thomian match, but succeeded in winning the Ryde Gold Medal for Latin at his new school. This astonished me, since I had never thought of him as in any sense interested in intellectual pursuits. On the other hand perhaps it was not difficult for him to shine, since Trinity too had not seemed to lay much stress on the life of the mind.

In all fairness I should note that that has changed, and I do not say this just because I now serve on the Trinity Board of Governors. I still recall my dismay when I found S. Thomas’ totally outclassed in a debate, way back in 1982, when I was engaged in my quixotic effort to clean up the College. I was scathing about the lackadaisical performance of boys who should have done much better, but I suppose I should not have blamed them. Those were the days when our examination results were appalling but the Board accepted the view that the boys came from a class that did not need to go to University.

Preserved from Leo’s schooldays are five postcards, with pictures of his schoolfriends in a custom that seems to have been common in those days, for the cards are of different sorts. Two are sent by the same person, an R J Hallyell, if I have read the signature correctly. The card is of the same design on the side for communication, but with two different pictures of Halyell on the other. He stands stiffly in one, in an oval frame, against an outdoor background that seems to have a spire as well an ornamental vase on a balustrade. He sits on a table in a rectangular frame in the other, more relaxed, but only slightly.

All Theodore Barcroft Moonemalle’s children who survived married and had children of their own, at least two in all four instances. Hardly any of his sister Ada’s children married. Five died in infancy or childhood, and two when they were young men. The three eldest never married, though the son, Edward Junior, Sonny, was certainly not celibate, his Burgher mistress supposedly the most respectable of his liaisons. Apart from being extremely handsome, unlike his more epicene younger brothers, he had captained the Thomian cricket team in 1907, the year in which ‘Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceyon’ was published. As in modern times, I suppose that is a position of advantage after which there is no looking back.

His two older sisters, Eva and Ida, on the other hand, were models of respectability. As women of the middle classes they doubtless had to be. Women of grander pedigree however could get away with looser behavior, the de Liveras who had a Kurunagala connection for instance being supposedly well known in this regard. Regrettably, I never found out from my grandmother what precisely her version was of Richard de Zoysa’s grandmother’s origins. The story I had from Richard was that an English couple had been travelling by ship via Colombo, and died suddenly, leaving an infant girl who was obligingly looked after by the de Livera sisters. I suppose the story would have struck anyone less naïve than me as unlikely, but I was not prepared for my grandmother, when I asked her about the pair in relation to the story I had been told, saying primly that that was what had been reported. She refused to be drawn further.

Edward and Ada Goonewardene had 12 children, but only seven of them grew into adults. And two of those died young, George Theodore Moonemalle Goonewardene at the age of 23 in 1918, and his younger brother Hugh seven years later. When his father died, he had insisted on following the coffin to the grave, even though he had flu. This had then turned into pneumonia, and he had died two weeks later.

I have always felt affection for Hugh, but not only because of this quixotic devotion. My grandmother, who had been four years younger than him, always spoke of him as the nicest of her brothers. Her eldest brother, young Edward, or Sonny as he was called, was a rebellious character who fell out with his father and was reported to have kept a Burgher mistress. The next brother, George, was supposed to have seduced several local damsels. It was rumoured that visitors to Kurunegala who were treated as confidantes were shown the offspring of some of these liaisons. Leo, the only other child apart from my grandmother to marry, was probably too near her in age for her to rely on him much when they were young, though in old age they seemed keenly devoted to each other.

I see her then as depending much on Hugh in the period just after George died, and the house that had been a haven of activity suddenly went still. She married in the following year, perhaps escaping from a difficult situation, with two unmarried older sisters both by then in their thirties. But she would return to the Old Place for her confinements, and I assume that then too Hugh was a tower of affection, if not exactly strength.